Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Western Industrial Civilization (WIC) is under attack by barbarian hordes. Some overtly seek its destruction; some lust after personal power over the lives and productivity of others; some seek to steal the wealth and power created by freeman citizens in order to use it to serve their own peculiar perversions; some are unable to cope with the pace of technological progress made possible by a free society self-regulated by the enlightened self-interest of the participants, and seek to obstruct and destroy the source of their personal discomfort; and some who are so aggressively incompetent that they can't even prosper in a free meritocracy, seek to create coercive artificial power structures within which their lack of real value to society will be perversely transformed into an advantage.

Among those claiming to be defenders of the West are substantial numbers who seek to exploit fears of external dangers to resurrect the Christian religionist oppression that aggressively obstructed the creation of the modern world for centuries. They try hard to spin the public perception into believing that the primary threat facing the West comes solely from Islamist religionists. They then claim that the only effective defense against Islamic religionist violence is Christian religionist violence.

What they don't want people to realize is that religionism is just a variation of authoritarianism, and has no meaningful connection with the fundamental rights of freemen to believe in whatever gods they please, as long as they don't attempt to impose their beliefs on others. The Islamic religionists are just part of the authoritarian alliance of convenience seeking to destroy the hated individual freedoms of WIC. The Christian religionists have no more respect for individualism, or a free secular society self-regulated by enlightened self-interest, than the Islamists. The Islamists are hardly the only religionists to have accumulated a long history of depraved violence in the name of their imaginary god.

There is good reason why America was founded on the principle of religious freedom. With many different religions competing for the wealth and obedience of the citizens, no single religion was able to achieve sufficient control over the citizens to impose its peculiar brand of oppressive theocracy. America has prospered because no single religion has been able to accumulate sufficient power and control to derail the rapidly accelerating engine of its free secular society.

Having largely lost in the contest of ideas, the Christian religionists are now hoping to win a contest of fears. It is individualism and mankind's only free secular society that are under attack, and both sides in the religionist choice of evils hate and fear these vastly superior alternatives to the irrational superstitions and fanatical violence of religionist theocracies. That which is most deserving of real defense will be destroyed by whatever variation of authoritarianism manages to most effectively deceive the fearful into surrendering their freedoms for empty promises of security. Many of those who turned to Stalin out of fear of the Nazis, paid the ultimate price when the monster their fears had created sent his own death squads to murder their loved ones.

It was once possible for an enlightened civilization to exist, and even prosper, in a world largely populated by barbarians. The primitive technology available to barbarians tended to limit the range of their depraved destruction. This is no longer true. The barbarians are now using products of advanced civilization that they are incapable of producing on their own, purchased using unearned wealth WIC has foolishly provided them in the hopes that they would use it to improve their own quality of life, to inflict death and destruction on their benefactors.

The most obvious barbarians are members of inferior cultures who need to eliminate competition from the vastly more successful WIC, in order to retain control over their deluded victims. Enlightened freemen tend to resent having the fruits of their productivity stolen to support the gratuitous waste and abuses of a parasitic ruling elite. These ruling elites would much rather destroy WIC and plunge the world into a new dark age, than risk their deluded subjects becoming sufficiently enlightened to reject the vile deceptions that have kept them in virtual chains for centuries.

Even more dangerous are the barbarians who infest WIC, seeking to divert the wealth and productivity that can only be created by a free society, to serve authoritarian agendas.

The most dangerous barbarians are those among us who are incapable of the enlightened self-regulation that is critically necessary to the functioning of a free society. Fearing their own freedom, they aggressively seek to eliminate the freedoms of all citizens. Adding to this internal threat are those who seek to validate their own self-destructive psychosis by projecting their self-hatred onto the civilization that benevolently tolerates their abuses. Many of the most dangerous barbarians even manage to deny the reality of their own barbarity, deceptively wrapping their crimes in a facade of positive terms stolen from far more honorable people and principles.

The most alarming aspect of the current global barbarian war against WIC, is that so few of those who claim to be participants in the greatest civilization mankind has ever created, truly understand what is under attack, and why it is worth defending. Far too many "citizens" of WIC lack a basic understand of what civilization is - what creates and perpetuates it.

A primary function of civilization is to artificially interfere with the brutally simplistic and inefficient laws of nature. The day to day "operational overhead" of being constantly on-guard against the bloody fangs and claws of the natural world, tends to consume all resources not already allocated to finding food and water. Add in the unpredictable opportunistic dangers posed by other members of our own species, and just staying alive becomes a full time job.

Those species that are well adapted to their environments stop here, not having any compelling need to go beyond refining their adaptation to their environment. If humans were well adapted to our environment, we wouldn't have much use for civilization.

Man is, within the limits of current knowledge, the only generalist species on Earth. Man isn't well adapted to any environment. Our species has taken a unique branch in evolution, developing an after-birth programmable general purpose brain that can adapt to a wide variety of environments. Along with the necessary increase in neural complexity came an administrative layer - a consciousness capable of awareness, and to some extent self-modifying the brain's programming to accommodate changes in the external environment.

Life in the primitive world doesn't leave much surplus productivity that can be invested in creating a complex technology base. It took early man hundreds of thousands of years to advance his technology base beyond chipped stones and recycled animal parts. It took nearly all of the time man has existed on this planet just to come up with the revolutionary idea of intentionally planting the seeds of useful plants, instead of wandering the countryside trying to find where they might have managed to grow on their own.

The first benefits of intentional agriculture were food and efficiency - it was now possible to produce a greater quantity of food with less time and effort than foraging. The time saved could be applied to improving agricultural technology, which further improved the efficiencies of agriculture. Civilization is in many ways an attempt to apply the efficiencies of intentional agriculture to other areas of life. Intentional agriculture has been the traditional first stepping stone to civilization.

At the core of every civilization is a social contract that defines the ways in which participants interact with each other. While the terms and conditions vary wildly, the most basic purpose of any social contract is to provide a degree of predictability to interactions between individuals. Unlike formal laws, the social contract is a virtual agreement that represents the perspectives and expectations that the participants actually use in their day to day lives. Ideally, formal laws implement the terms and conditions of the social contract, but they rarely achieve this objective in reality - and all too often are used to legitimize abuses of the social contract.

Some social contracts simply predict the outcomes of primitive brute violence - the most belligerently violent gets the biggest chunk of meat because he is expected to be able to take it anyway. Most social contracts have sought to formalize exploitive hierarchies, and perpetuate the dominance of arbitrarily defined ruling classes. The original social contract at the core of WIC was a revolutionary experiment in individual liberty that has been an unparalleled success in providing its participants with the highest standard of living, and greatest prosperity ever achieved.

Freedom can only exist within a civilization that values freedom. A prosperous free civilization can only exist to the extent it is willing and able to defend itself from the violent criminality of inferior non-free cultures.

The West technically possesses the means to eliminate every trace of the barbarians from the face of the earth. Not only could it in theory kill every barbarian man, woman, and child, it could in theory vaporize their bodies, and turn the passive enemies that currently provide the sanctuaries from which the barbarians attack WIC, into sterile wastelands that would be uninhabitable for thousands of year.

However, contrary to the lies of those who claim that the simple possession of an evil firearm will cause an otherwise rational individual to compulsively mass murder doe eyed children and soft fuzzy puppies, WIC has somehow managed to resist the urge to unleash its vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction - in spite of countless opportunities. There is serious doubt whether WIC would allow itself to use its most powerful weapons even when faced with eminent destruction. There is a significant portion of the WIC population who would rather die than defend themselves against the barbarians - or permit other WIC citizens to effectively defend themselves.

The barbarians are obviously confident that WIC is unwilling to do to them what they would do to WIC if they possessed the means. The barbarians are currently doing everything in their power to obtain just enough scientific knowledge to destroy our modern world, and regress all of mankind back to the primitive brutish violence of the natural world, where they expect to rule over whatever is left. The terrible destruction that inhibits the enlightened participants in WIC from using their most powerful weapons, is considered a desirable objective by those whose stated desire is to utterly destroy the modern world created by WIC.

The real question then becomes whether the pampered products of the unparalleled prosperity created by WIC, are still willing to preserve and defend the greatest treasure mankind has ever created - the grand experiment in individual liberty that made our modern world possible.

An alarming percentage of the beneficiaries of WIC are distressingly willing to let the barbarians achieve their goal. Even more are unwilling to accept the reality of the threat facing them, and demand that WIC base its defense on what the deluded want to believe, instead of the demonstrated nature of the threat.

Having lived all their lives coddled within the exceptional safety provide by our advanced civilization, they want to deny the reality of human nature, and believe that all that is needed to civilize the barbarians is to "allow" them to participate in our civilization. They want to believe that the barbarians are the aberration - that they are only barbarians because somehow they have been deprived of their right to become civilized. Within this tortured logic, it becomes the fault of the civilized that there remain barbarians who are being "deprived" of the many benefits that WIC provides to its participants.

They also want to believe that being civilized can be a partial commitment - that civilization exists outside of the actions of individual participants, and that the character of the participants doesn't directly affect the nature and functionality of the resulting civilization. They want to believe that WIC will continue to provide the tremendous benefits of being civilized, even when an increasing percentage of the beneficiaries no longer understand or actively support the social contract that made WIC possible.

They want to believe that civilization can be imposed from above through the imposition of arbitrary laws by coercive governments - that it is within the power of government to create civilization independent of the participation of the individual citizens.

They want to believe that profound distortions of the social contract, intended to provide superficial short term benefits to special interests, or to provide superficial compensation for perceived inequities, won't compromise the continued survival of the civilization they are abusing.

Most of all, they want to believe that such high level principles as human and civil rights can exist outside and independent of the civilization that gives these principles meaning, and makes them possible. America's founding documents speak of "inalienable rights", but what is overlooked is that these concepts only have meaning within the context of individuals who truly value these rights.

It's become popular to demand that the rights of freemen be extended to barbarians, even when those barbarians use their unappreciated rights to deprive others of their freedom. It isn't possible to set a slave free simply by removing his chains. The slave must also want to be free, and be willing to assume personal responsibility for his own welfare. It's a distressingly common pattern for freed slaves to use their unappreciated freedom to re-enslave themselves to a new master - often in the process enslaving those who had foolishly tried to free them from their previous masters.

The ongoing tragedy of the former Rhodesia is a case in point. The overt racism of white ruled Rhodesia attracted the attention of neo-racists in the West, who had already gained substantial power and influence through the aggressive promotion of their neo-racist grievance industry. These "new and improved racists" saw an opportunity to increase their own power and influence by assuming the false facade of enlightened liberators.

A global movement of aggressively ignorant would-be do-gooders was assembled to pressure the UN and national governments to impose intolerable economic sanctions on Rhodesia, with the express intention of forcing the Rhodesians to extend political power to those the neo-racists claimed were cruelly oppressed slaves. This superficially high minded campaign made for a lot of useful socioeconomic leverage and politically useful sound-bites in the West - until it succeeded in its goal of destroying the flawed but functioning socioeconomic system of Rhodesia. Once the demonized privileged class of prosperous Rhodesia was forced to arbitrarily extend the rights of participation in their social contract to those who lacked the necessary philosophical perspectives required to actually participate in a free society, the Western media lost all interest in what these newly enfranchised "citizens" did with their right to vote.

The embarrassing reality is that the first time the "freed slaves" of Rhodesia got an opportunity to exercise their newly "won" freedom, they used it to enslave themselves to even more abusive masters. Instead of using their vote to protect and preserve their freedom, they voted for a one party Marxist authoritarian government that immediately eliminated the right to vote for all citizens. (The fake soviet style voting now practiced in Zimbabwe is hardly the same as the single meaningful vote that imposed the disaster of socialist authoritarianism on the nation.)

What was once the prosperous nation of Rhodesia that exported large quantities of surplus food to the rest of Africa, has now become the bankrupt, despot ruled, famine-racked, hell-hole of Zimbabwe, that only survives by begging large quantities of food aid from the still prosperous economies of the still party free WIC.

Unwilling to recognize the terrible tragedies their delusions have already caused, there are many who loudly demand a Rhodesia/Zimbabwe "solution" to the claimed flaws of WIC. In their arrogant ignorance, the self-deluded now demand that their desire to repeat the appalling catastrophes of the past be respected by those who are actually capable of learning from man's long history of tragic mistakes.